November 17, 2024

About the Symposium

Credit: In The Turkish Family, by Jules Mordecai Pascin

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Presented in partnership by the Center for Jewish History and the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization

Translating Jewishness: Conversations on Culture and Civilization draws on the collection of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization to engage two key modes of Jewish expression: anthologies and translations. Throughout the centuries, Jews have gathered selections from the storehouse of Jewish culture and civilization into more widely accessible anthologies. In addition, for as long as Jews have lived dispersed across the globe, they have translated their sacred texts into their current vernaculars. As Jews settled in more places and began to speak more languages, the choice of what to translate and make more readily available for contemporary audiences became more complicated. Translation accompanied anthologizing. This symposium explores the dynamics of translating and dimensions of the Jewish anthological imagination.

Related Exhibition

Translating Jewishness: Culture and Civilization in the Posen Library

Between 1880 and 1918, around the globe, regimes collapsed, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened. Few communities experienced the pressures and possibilities of the era more profoundly than the world’s Jews. 

This exhibit focuses on the range of Jewish expression—from mystical visions to political thought, cookbooks to literary criticism, modernist poetry to vaudeville—in English translations in Volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, edited by Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss. It features examples from seven languages drawn from sources at the Center for Jewish History.

Jewish secularism and the resurgence of traditionalism, the remaking of Jews as a modern nation, cultural assimilation and integration, the triumphs of Zionism and its discontents—all have their roots in this era. This exhibit offers an engaging starting point for anyone wishing to understand the divided Jewish present.

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The symposium is presented in partnership with the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. It is the sixth installment in a larger series of public symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish History’s Jewish Public History Forum.

Sessions

November 17, 2024
Welcome/Intros | 1:00PM ET
Session One | 1:10PM ET
Anthologies

Jews have a long-standing love affair with anthologies. It started with Tanakh, an amazing anthology of narrative, history, poetry, prophecy, and much more. And then it continued across the centuries. Anthologizing allowed Jews to engage with the past—to read what had been written—and then to choose what spoke to them in the present. Some Jewish anthologies, like the Passover Haggadah, continue to be revised to this day. The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is an anthology for 21st-century Jews. This session explores contemporary Jewish anthologies, their scope and motives.

Miriam Udel

Emory University

Julia Philips Cohen

Vanderbilt University

Adriana Brodsky

St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Moderated by Markus Krah

Leo Baeck Institute

Break | 2:10PM ET
Session Two | 2:30PM ET
Translations

Translating a text raises so many questions for the translator, starting with the basics: what to translate and how to translate. This panel looks at the choices and challenges of translating from Jewish languages into English and considers how translation might help to turn English into a type of Jewish language.

Anita Norich

University of Michigan

Devi Mays

University of Michigan

Bryan Roby

University of Michigan

Moderated by David Roskies

Jewish Theological Seminary

Coffee break | 3:30PM ET
Session Three | 4:00PM ET
Volume 7

Between 1880 and 1918, traditions and regimes collapsed, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened as never before. In National Renaissance and International Horizons, 18801918, Volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, editors Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss capture the full range of Jewish expression of that age—from mystical visions to unabashedly antitraditional Jewish political thought, from cookbooks to literary criticism, from modernist poetry to vaudeville. They also highlight the most remarkable dimension of the era: an audacious effort by newly secular Jews to replace Judaism itself with a new kind of Jewish culture centering on this-worldly, aesthetic creativity by a posited “Jewish nation” and the secular, modern, and “free” individuals who composed it. This volume is an essential starting point for anyone who wishes to understand the divided Jewish present.

Israel Bartal

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Kenneth Moss

University of Chicago

Moderated by Avery Robinson

The Nadav Fund

Reception | 5:00PM ET

Please stay and join panelists, scholars, and Posen Library staff and contributors for a post-symposium reception with light hors d'oeuvres and libations. All are welcome!



Speakers

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Israel Bartal

Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Professor (Emeritus) of Jewish History and former dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2006–2010). He was chair of the Historical Society of Israel (from 2006 to 2015) and is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences. A founder of Cathedra, a leading scholarly journal on the history of the land of Israel, he served as its co-editor for more than twenty years. His numerous publications include The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881 (2005; also published in Russian and German); To Redeem a People: Enlightenment and Nationalism in Eastern Europe (2013) [Hebrew]; and Tangled Roots: The Emergence of Israeli Culture (2020). He is co-editor, with David Roskies, of volume 7 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918 (2023).

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Adriana M. Brodsky

Adriana M. Brodsky is professor of Latin American and Jewish history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her monograph Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Creating Community and National Identity, 1880–1960 appeared in 2016, and her most recent publication is the co-edited anthology Jews across the Americas (with Laura Leibman), which tells the history of Jews on the American continent from 1492 to the 2020s. She has published on Sephardic food, schools, beauty contests, and Latin American Jewish history in general. She is currently finishing a manuscript on Jewish Argentine youth movements from the 1940s to the 1970s. She is co-president of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA).

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Julia Phillips Cohen

Julia Phillips Cohen is associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (2014) and editor, together with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, of the anthology Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 17001950 (2014). Together with Devi Mays, she is currently writing a book on a forgotten network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.

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Markus Krah

Markus Krah has been the executive director of the Leo Baeck Institute New York since 2022. He received his Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary and subsequently taught Jewish religious and intellectual history at University of Potsdam in his native Germany. His first book, American Jewry and the Re-Invention of the East European Jewish Past (2017), dealt with the East European heritage in the American Jewish imagination. His current research, a history of Schocken Books, explores how the publisher used  the genre of the anthology to bring German Jewish culture to post-1945 American Jewish readers.

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Devi Mays

Devi Mays is associate professor of Judaic studies and history at the University of Michigan specializing in Sephardi history and culture. Her book, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (2020), won prizes from the American Historical Association, the National Jewish Book Council, and the Association for Jewish Studies. In addition to scholarly articles, she has published numerous translations from Ladino and other languages. Together with Marina Mayorski, she is currently working on an anthology of late-Ottoman Ladino fiction translated into English for Ayin Press.

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Kenneth B. Moss

Kenneth B. Moss is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918 (2023), co-edited with Israel Bartal. His other works include the award-winning An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (2021; Polish translation underway), the prizewinning Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (2009; revised Hebrew version, 2022), the co-edited From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (2021), and many articles. From 2014 to 2020, he co-edited Jewish Social Studies.

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Anita Norich

Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories, among them the previously untranslated stories of Israel Joshua Singer. She is also the author of The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991); Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America during the Holocaust (2007); and Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the Twentieth Century (2014). She translates Yiddish literature and lectures and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

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Avery Robinson

Avery Robinson is a former editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. He works as a program officer for The Natan Fund, manages Black Rooster Food, and is a co-founder of Rye Revival. Avery has an MA in Judaic studies from the University of Michigan.

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Bryan K. Roby

Bryan K. Roby is associate professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the history of race/racism, Black diasporas, and Jewish identity in Israel/Palestine and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. His first book, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle 1948–1966 (2015) provided an extensive history of social justice protests by Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. His current project, Blackness Refracted: Race and the Making of the Jewish Color Line in the Twentieth Century, traces the migration history of racialized peoples and ideas across seas and oceans throughout the global twentieth century. As Head Fellow for the 2024–2025 Frankel Institute, he is working on a translation project of queer Mizrahi poetry in Hebrew.

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David G. Roskies

David G. Roskies is emeritus professor of Yiddish literature and culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1981 (with the late Alan Mintz), he co-founded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and he served for eighteen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. A major focus of his work is the Holocaust. In 1984, his Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa. He is the co-author, with Naomi Diamant, of Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (2013). In addition, Roskies has published three anthologies on the Holocaust: The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (1989), Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History (2019), and Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973, co-edited with Samuel D. Kassow (2020; volume 9 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization).

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Miriam Udel

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. In 2025, Princeton University Press will publish her critical study of Ashkenazi Jewish modernity reimagined through the corpus of Yiddish children’s literature. She is spending 2024–2025 in New York as the recipient of three distinct honors: the inaugural Robert S. Rifkind Senior Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History, the Covenant Foundation Jewish Family Education Fellowship, and the Emory College Chronos Fellowship.

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